How to live an environmentally conscious life

We don’t need to increase our goods nearly as much as we need to scale down our wants. Not wanting something is as good as possessing it.
~Donald Horban

Alright, so I don’t give a damn about global warming, I don’t think the Earth is in a dramatic tail-spin toward Impending Doom, and I think most “green” ideas and products are crap.

So how the hell does one be environmentally conscious, then? How do you live green when most green is bullshit?

Minimal impact living.

The Earth doesn’t have to be doomed in order for us to be environmentally conscious. Global warming doesn’t have to be real in order for us to ditch the cars.

Live by utilizing the least amount of space and resources necessary. Make trade-offs if you have to…this isn’t a game of “greener than thou.” I don’t always make it to the farmer’s market. So what, I bike or walk to the grocery store, and I don’t eat very much, anyway.

Least amount of space can mean many things. An apartment in the city, an RV, a very tiny house, eating less so fewer acres of land are put into production, buying fewer clothes for the same reason. Supporting wild/green spaces, national, state, and city parks and lands.

Consuming fewer resources means buying less and using less. Ditching the car as much as possible to avoid the consumption of oil (which reduces the need to drill, the oil spills, and all the political bullshit that goes with it), not to mention the resources necessary just to make the car and keep it running. There’s no free lunch…an organic cotton dress is just as resource-intensive as a conventional dress. It’s better to just hit up the thrift shops and your friends’ closets until you find something that will work.

Give up excess anything. All those pointless things that no one questions. Straws, shoes, the chocolate chips my workplace insists on putting on the already pretty damn chocolatey brownies. Junk mail, souvenirs, books you can check out from the library, movies and games you watch/play so infrequently that it’s easier to just rent them. That guest bedroom or bathroom that only gets used once a year. The proverbial second/vacation house (god I don’t even know anyone with one of these). Second vehicles, recreational vehicles, I could go on.

It’s all variations on the same theme, really. Live small, live simple, live minimal, live green. All the same damn thing, just with different foci.